Legal Agreement Bummer

I learnt a pretty hard lesson today: Read the legal agreements of the applications you release and the websites you launch.

In a nutshell the legal agreement we just took to use at PowerGUI.org contained a clause basically saying that Quest may use the registration information to “occasionally … communicate” something to the participants. The real shame is that I only read this when I came across Rod Trend blogging about PowerGUI.

His post starts quite nice saying:

“Maybe someone in this “community” could invent their own Windows PowerShell GUI to share, since we already have a horde of Windows PowerShell content and scripts available. (hoping I’m putting a bug in someone’s ear)”

But then he reads the legal agreement and finds this not so clever quote.

Anyway, regarding this particular clause:

I totally agree that this is not acceptable and will work to make sure that the clause is removed. PowerGUI.org is not a lead-generation tool and we have no intent what-so-ever to use the registration information in any way.

In general, apart from this “spam” clause (which will be removed promptly) I see no reason to hide that Quest is indeed sponsoring the community and the PowerGUI development effort. Quest has a long history in Windows Management and is now investing in PowerShell in its commercial applications. PowerGUI was created to help PowerShell get more widely adopted and that is why both the tool and the community are absolutely free. There is no conspiracy here. Just Quest’s good will and us at PowerGUI not reading the agreement before posting it.

The fact that Quest is sponsoring the community does not make it less valuable and independent. There are already great PowerPacks people are putting on the library: the stuff to manage MOM, KMS, etc. – the things we could not add to the tool ourselves and that provide for scenarios not existing in native or Quest tools – these are created by the community and available absolutely for free.

In my opinion it is great that Quest is sponsoring the effort (but yes we need to remove this clause from the agreement.)

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